Florida Congressman: Stimulus Bill Is Funding Porn

Florida’s Republican Congressman from its Sixth District, Rep. Cliff Stearns, has recently charged that $50 million in the $787 billion economic stimulus bill is being used to fund the National Endowment for the Arts and that some of this taxpayer money is funding pornography.

Congressman Stearns has provided to HUMAN EVENTS a letter signed by fifty Congressmen to NEA Chair Patrice Walker Powell complaining about such inappropriate funding — funding that violates prior promises by the NEA that it would not spend money to promote such perversion and that such funding clearly causes a political problem for the NEA at a time when Americans want their tax dollars spent to stimulate the economy, not stimulate porn customers. A copy of the letter to the NEA chair is here.

Here are just three examples of some of the NEA “stimulus” grants, according to Stearns:

• $50,000 to the Frameline film house to screen Thundercrack, which Frameline describes as "the world’s only underground kinky art porno horror film, complete with four men, three women and a gorilla. Ecstasy so great that all heaven and hell becomes just one big old Shangri-La! You will be seduced into accepting this orgy of sexual liberation!”

• $25,000 to San Francisco’s CounterPULSE to make Perverts Put Out in the NEA’s “dance” category. This weekly performance is called “ a pansexual performance series.”

• A $25,000 grant to Jess Curtis/Gravity, Inc., whose most recent work is the Symmetry Project in which nude couples, including children, are mounted on each other in various poses.

This is the latest in a series of scandals involving the National Endowment for the Arts. In the 1980s, the NEA funded Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” which was submerged image of Christ on a cross in the artist’s urine. Then there was NEA funding for the exhibitions of Robert Maplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs depicting a bullwhip inserted…well, never mind. The spending of tax dollars on such “art” led to successful efforts led by North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms to reduce NEA funding to below $100 million per annum. President Reagan attempted, unsuccessfully, to abolish the NEA altogether.

Stearns has been leading the effort against the funding of the NEA in recent years in light of NEA promises not to fund “art” that would offend most Americans.

But with the earmarked economic stimulus funding, the NEA budget is now back up around $190 million per annum.

Stearns was asked by HUMAN EVENTS, “Wasn’t Vice President Biden charged with oversight of stimulus spending when President Obama proclaimed in his State of the Union message, “Nobody messes with Joe”? Stearns said, “Biden’s not doing his job. It’s a joke to think the Vice President could oversee anything. He has no record of good oversight.”

Stearns went on by asking, “The fundamental question is this: Why is the federal government subsidizing ‘artists’ that citizens refuse to support in the marketplace? We are funding bestiality and children appearing with nude adults. As to the economic stimulus rationale, there’s none. There are no long-term jobs in this stuff. This is politics, political correctness gone awry. They’re just funding pornography, and there’s no legitimate reason for it. And the American people understand that it is undermining our culture and glamorizing perversion on their dime.”